Janet Yellen and the permanent plateau

LONDON – Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Tuesday that she believes banking regulators have made enough improvements to the financial system that the world will not experience another financial crisis “in our lifetimes.”

Addressing an audience at the British Academy in London on Tuesday, Yellen said the banking reforms put in place in recent years have made the financial system much safer. She said regulators are doing a better job of watching for the type of systemic risks that struck the global economy in 2008, bringing on the worst global downturn in seven decades.

“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis?” Yellen asked. “You know probably that would be going too far, but I do think we are much safer, and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.”

When hearing this, my mind reeled. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! Not experience another financial crisis “in our lifetimes?” Did she not read or see The Big Short, or know of LTCM, or a host of other near misses in the financial system, with lots of other people (with Nobel prizes to boot) saying similar things?

…this bizarre belief was mindlessly replicated in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-’08, with investors believing that a 20 percent decline in house prices “was likely to happen only in a time frame many, many trillions of years longer than the history of the universe.”

Janet seems to have crossed some sort of intellectual event horizon, where the Fed and the bankers can do no wrong.

Questions:

Is she having a ‘senior moment’?

What sort of person makes this kind of broad statement?

Is anybody betting on this kind of crazy pronouncement?

Does Ms. Yellen read any history books?

(Yes, we are off schedule this week – back with another interesting short article next Tuesday, 2017 July 4).